The Pottery House, a genuine Frank Lloyd Wright house in Santa Fe, is on the market.

The home, in the Vista Cañada Ancha subdivision off Hyde Park Road, was completed in the mid-1980s from a design Wright did in 1928.

The issue of what are and what are not "genuine Wrights" hinges on whether the construction of such homes from the architect's unbuilt portfolio was supervised by people from his organization, Taliesin Architects.

This one was.

About a decade ago, the board of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation decreed that his unbuilt plans could no longer be used to build new houses. The rationale is that the merits of a design from half a century ago don't necessarily translate into today's world — with today's environmental requirements, for example.

But when the unbuilt program was active, Taliesen Architects oversaw it, and such houses are considered Frank Lloyd Wright houses. The plans for the Pottery House project were adapted by Taliesin's Charles Montooth and Wesley Peters.

Wright, according to the American Institute of Architects, is the greatest American architect. He was born in 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, and he died in 1959. During his career, he designed 1,141 houses, churches, schools, and other types of buildings. Of those designs, 532 were built in his lifetime.

He is perhaps best known for the Edgar Kaufmann house — popularly called Fallingwater — in Bear Run, Pa. It's an architectural symphony composed of a three-story tower of stacked stone offset by a series of spectacularly cantilevered balconies.

But cylindrical forms such as the distinctive, two-sided fireplace at the heart of the Pottery House also show up in many other of his buildings, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

In the Pottery House, Montooth and Peters (who was Wright's structural engineer on both Fallingwater and the Guggenheim) completed Wright's only adobe house.

The great architect was a fan of adobe. In the 2003 book Fallingwater Rising, architectural historian Franklin Toker conjectures that the famous house's penthouse steps were modeled after adobe kiva steps at San Ildefonso Pueblo, which Wright may have visited in 1935.

Of course, he couldn't use adobe in Pennsylvania, but he did the next best thing. "In making the steps out of concrete Wright used a modern derivative to praise the great builders of ancient America," Toker writes. Wright also sent the Kaufmanns an old Indian pot as a color guide for Fallingwater's red railings and window frames.

Wright did the design for the Pottery House for a client in El Paso for a site that is surrounded by sand dunes. It was never built.

More than 50 years later, Charles Klotsche, a real-estate developer from Wisconsin, purchased the plans from Taliesin Architects. The Santa Fe construction was supervised by Montooth. The contractor was Ray Valdez of Santa Fe.

The shape of the home, in plan (as if viewed from above) is like an eye, and that shape is repeated in the central courtyard, several feature windows, and even in the pot-hanging rack in the kitchen.

The courtyard is sheltered by the house's two curving wings, one holding the living room and three bedrooms and the other holding the dining room, breakfast nook, kitchen and study.

The house's walls are pot-like, swelling out from the base. But the main pot form is in the big fireplace that opens both to the living room and the courtyard. The living room boasts ceilings of Douglas fir with long, wooden "boxes" that conceal lighting; and that fabulous pot-like fireplace.

It's a fat, plastered barrel on top of a triangular, brick pedestal. The asymmetrical flues for the inside and outside fireboxes demanded some intense engineering, for which Valdez got help from metalworker Ray Martinez.

In the December 1985 issue of Architectural Digest, Montooth described another Wright invention, "a double row of ordinary clay drainage tiles set high in the walls to provide light and ventilation. Mr. Wright designed the house before air conditioning had become popular, so the tiles would have served to let the wind blow through. With air conditioning, we now had to keep the wind out. So we decided that Mr. Wright wouldn't mind our putting glass in the tiles."

Montooth's changes from the original Wright plans included a proportionally expanded house — from 2,400 square feet to nearly 5,000 square feet — with seven fireplaces, and a swimming pool in a space that was to be a garden. At the northwest corner, the pool narrows to a swimming lane that goes right into the house.

Montooth also added a glassed-in gallery along the bedroom wing, facing the patio, as protection from Santa Fe's wintertime cold.

In a 1987 story in Fine Homebuilding, Charles Miller, the magazine's Western editor, wondered what kind of house Wright might have designed for the Santa Fe site, but he allowed that it certainly has a more useful kitchen than the small one in the original design.

Construction was completed in 1984, and the home was then purchased by the Soeiro family. Today, it's being put on the market by owners Andrea Soeiro and her brother, Sancho Soeiro.

Part of the line of drainage-tile windows goes along the wall in the library, which was Andrea Soeiro's bedroom as a teenager. On the wall of the adjacent lanai is one of those eye-shaped windows with views of the garden and the distant mountains.

"This house is the most thoughtful, scholarly house, very quiet, and it's also an amazing party house," she said. "And it transforms at night. With the lighting that was put in, it really looks like a spaceship at night."

On 9 acres, the Pottery House is listed for $4,750,000. See www.flw-potteryhouse.com for more information.

Contact Paul Weideman at 986-3043 or pweideman@sfnewmexican.com.